Grosse Ile Township consists of a large island and several smaller islands adjacent to Detroit. The area has about 10,000 residents. The Animals’ Island League Shelter (T.A.I.L.S.) is a private non-profit that partners with the township for animal sheltering. The shelter’s website states: “Although the Animal Shelter is owned and operated by the Township, we, as stewards of the Grosse Ile Animal Shelter, are dedicated to providing the additional financial support needed to make our homeless animal friends happy, healthy, and adoptable.” The shelter’s website describes its operations as follows: “The Grosse Ile Animal Shelter houses stray animals picked up by Animal Control and those turned in by Grosse Ile residents only. Stray animals must be picked up by Animal Control at your residence or the location where the stray animal was found. We are not able to house surrendered animals from other communities.” The website does not mention any restriction on owner surrenders other than community residency. Michigan shelters report their statistics to the state. In 2010, the shelter reported a live release rate of 94%, and in 2011 it reported 91%. The reported live release rate improved to 95% in 2012. Grosse Ile, MI, is listed in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

[NOTE: The Worth Watching category lists communities whose animal shelter systems are doing substantially better than average, but have not reported a sustained (for one year or more) 90%+ live release rate. These communities are not counted in the running total of 90%+ communities. For more about the Worth Watching category, see the Worth Watching page link in the blog’s header.] St. Paul, Minnesota (population 295,000) lies alongside the city of Minneapolis (population 400,000), and the two are known as the Twin Cities. The Twin Cities metro area has 3.8 million people. St. Paul has a municipal department that operates the city’s Animal Control Center (ACC). Molly Lunaris took over as director of the ACC in the fall of 2013. I spoke to her yesterday about the ACC, and she sent me statistics from 2013 and 2014. She told me that the ACC accepts owner surrenders as well as strays, and the only requirement is that a person surrendering an animal must be a St. Paul resident. In 2013 the ACC’s live release rate for the year was 61%. So far in 2014 it has improved substantially, with an 81% live release rate through September. The shelter offers owner-requested euthanasia, and with owner-requested euthanasia and deaths in shelter care counted as part of euthanasias, the live release rate is 74% so far in 2014. The ACC does very few adoptions, and returns most of its animals to their owners or transfers them to approved 501(c)(3) rescues. Their intake is quite small relative to the city’s population (1541 dogs and cats in 2013, which is 5 per 1000 people). St. Paul is one of those situations where the city shelter’s performance is perhaps better than it looks on paper, for a couple of reasons. First, they may be receiving a higher proportion of the city’s hard-to-place animals, because they have a large non-profit in the city that also does intake. The private Animal Humane Society, which describes itself as “open admission,” has several locations including one in St. Paul. According to their website they take in owner surrenders and some strays. Often in a situation like this with a large private shelter doing intake, the city shelter winds up with a higher percentage of problem cases (such as seizures and hoarding cases) simply because they are the organization that gets the animal control calls. The second reason that the ACC’s performance may be better than it looks on paper is that the shelter is doing several things to divert intake. For instance, animal control officers are following the latest recommendations of No Kill shelter experts by not picking up stray cats unless they need help. The ACC also makes efforts to return animals in the  field, which can reduce intake. I do not have combined numbers for the ACC and the Animal Humane Society, but it look as though their combined live release rate would be about 85% so far in 2014. With kitten season finished, it’s possible that the combined live release rate could reach 90% for 2014 as a whole.

Nelson County, Virginia, is a rural county midway between Charlottesville and Lynchburg. The population is about 15,000. Nelson County Animal Control (NCAC) is the municipal agency that takes in strays and owner surrenders for the county. In November 2012, a new animal control director with a background in management took over. The new director stated in a January 2013 interview that euthanasia is generally performed only on animals who are aggressive or sick. The Humane Society/SPCA of Nelson County (HSNC) is a private agency that pulls animals from NCAC and has an adoption center. In an article about its medical fund, HSNC reported that it takes in about 1000 animals per year. HSNC also accepts owner surrenders, but only if they have space and evaluate the animal as adoptable. In addition to its adoption center, HSNC uses transports to rescues to place animals. I confirmed in a phone call to HSNC that all transfers are to No Kill organizations.  HSNC has a stated goal for the county of ensuring that “no healthy, non-aggressive animal is euthanized.” NCAC and HSNC both report to the Virginia state database. In 2014, the combined live release rate for both NCAC and HSNC was 92% (88% if animals who died or were lost in shelter care are counted as euthanasias). This number probably understates the actual live release rate because I did not count any transfers from NCAC as live releases. The purpose of this was to avoid double counting of live releases since the majority of the transfers went to HSNC. In 2013 and 2012 the combined live release rates for NCAC and HSNC were in the 80th percentile. Nelson County has a very high intake of dogs and cats. The combined total intake of NCAC and HSNC for 2014, not counting transfers from NCAC, was 1386, which is 92 animals for every 1000 people in the community. Average intake for the US as a whole is thought to be from 15 to 30 animals per 1000 people. Nelson County, Virginia, is counted in the blog’s Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

[Dear Readers – This is the first in a series of occasional posts on shelter data. Not statistics on individual shelters, but more general things such as how to calculate success rates, how adoption rates have changed over time, and, today’s topic, the number of animal shelters in the United States. I get so many requests from people for this kind of data that it seems as though there is really a need for it, and it can be hard to find. I will collect these posts – and a few older posts on data topics – in a “Shelter Data” tab in the blog’s header.] Did you ever wonder how many public shelters there are in the United States? By “public shelter” I mean a shelter that is charged with impounding strays and other animals taken in by animal control, and usually takes in owner surrenders as well. A public shelter may be run by a city or county government, or the government may contract with a private entity to run the shelter. The surprising fact is that no one seems to know for sure how many of these shelters exist in the United States. One estimate often cited is about 5000 shelters. This estimate was made by the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy for surveys they did in the 1990s, but about 1/4th of the shelters included were private. In 1999 HSUS developed a list of about 3500 shelters, although some of these were duplicates. Today we usually hear one or the other of these figures cited as the number of public shelters in the United States. The 3500 figure correlates pretty well with the number of counties in the United States plus the larger cities. We have 3144 counties in the United States according to the United States Census Bureau. The National League of Cities, using a slightly older census, has identified 3033 counties that have governments. There are about 300 cities in the United States with 100,000 or more people, and another 362 cities with a population of 50,000 to 100,000. If you reduce the number of counties slightly to account for the few counties that have no animal shelter, you could derive an estimate of about 3500 for all counties, plus cities of 50,000 or more. This estimate of 3500 is probably good if you don’t mind missing small shelters, but it may be too low if you want to capture all public shelters. The National League puts the total number of city/town governments in the United States at 19,492 (this does not count townships or special districts). If we subtract the 662 cities of 50,000 population or more, that leaves 18,830 small jurisdictions that could potentially have small shelters. Many of these jurisdictions (probably the great majority of them) do not have their own public shelters because they are served by a larger nearby jurisdiction, but some of them do have small community shelters. Thus, the estimate of 5000 shelters in the United States may be closer to the mark if you want to cover all public shelters. But as you can see, both the 3500 and the 5000 estimates have a wide potential margin of error. Is there any easy way to get an actual count or a better estimate of the number of public shelters in the United States? One way to get a better estimate might be to look at states that have reporting requirements for public shelters. There are several states, including Colorado, Michigan, California, North Carolina, and Virginia that require public shelters to report to the state each year. In theory one could figure out the number of public shelters in all of those states and then extrapolate to the United States population. In practice, this would be time consuming because many private shelters and rescues are also subject to reporting requirements, so a lot of research would be involved to sort out the public shelters. Plus, there is no guarantee that states that require reporting are representative of the other states. Another way might be to find out from the makers of the various shelter software programs how many shelters use each program, and add them up – or to count the shelters on Petfinder. The problem is that, as with the state databases, there are a great many private shelters that use shelter software, and a great many private shelters and rescues that use Petfinder. There is no easy way to separate out the public shelters from the rest. One could make an actual count by looking at every county and every city and town, but with over 20,000 of those jurisdictions in the United States it would be an enormous task. Each community would have to be researched to find out if it has a public shelter. In many communities telephone calls would have to be made to determine where strays and owner surrenders from the jurisdiction are sheltered, because the information is often not easily accessible online. And even if we could derive an exact number and create a list of public shelters it would be something of a moving target, since governments frequently change their animal sheltering arrangements. Another problem would be how to account for large private shelters that voluntarily take in owner surrenders from the public but do not take in strays and do not have any contract with a city or county. These large humane societies might take in half or more of the homeless animals in their jurisdiction, even though they are not municipal shelters and do not contract with the local government for animal sheltering. Why is it important for us to know the number of public shelters? If we want to measure how we are doing in the United States at saving the lives of homeless animals, we have to know how many homeless animals there are each year and what happens to them. If we look at all shelters, both public and private, then we have a lot of transfers of animals from one shelter to another, making it difficult or impossible to know how many animals we are dealing with. What we need to know is the number of animals impounded by animal control plus the number of owner surrenders in each jurisdiction, and that means limiting our inquiry to those public shelters that have animal control duties, plus any private shelters in the community that take in significant numbers of owner surrenders directly from the public (since they are serving a public function). Without that data we will never know for sure how we are doing. I think if we are ever going to be able to have accurate, up-to-date counts of animals coming into shelters in the United States we may need to rely on private organizations doing counts on a state-by-state basis. The Michigan Pet Fund Alliance has a project of this sort, where they list shelters each year by category. They have a head start on this project because Michigan is one of the states that requires shelters to report, but they have also invested the time to determine if each shelter is public or private and how it handles admissions. The shelter federation in New Hampshire records data for the state’s public shelters, although they make only aggregate data available and not the data from each shelter. Best Friends could probably tell us how many public shelters are in Utah and their intake and disposition of animals. State alliances and organizations are ideally suited to simplify the task of identifying public shelters, because coalitions of people who work on sheltering within a state will have a great deal of knowledge about local situations starting out and will need to spend much less time on research than an outsider would. Perhaps one of these days one of the big national organizations will offer grants to state alliances to collect such data in a standard format and make it available. State alliances that would pitch in and do this task, especially where combined with state reporting systems, could quickly solve our data-collection problem and give us valuable information about how we are doing nationwide at shelter lifesaving.

The Association of Shelter Veterinarians (ASV) has removed its draft statement on No-Kill terminology, which was in a comment period. Thank you ASV for listening to people’s concerns. PetSmart Charities has issued an in-depth report on how San Antonio went from killing 90% of shelter animals 10 years ago to saving almost 90% today. The turnaround happened in several steps, including a planned effort to get all the animal welfare organizations working together, removing legal barriers to TNR, finding high-volume rescue partners, establishment of an adoption center, and massive spay-neuter efforts for owned pets. San Antonio was one of the few cities that in 2005, ten years ago, still had a serious problem of permanently homeless dogs roaming the streets, not to mention lots of community cats. Thanks to spay-neuter and TNR, the populations of free-roaming cats and dogs are down. Still, the San Antonio organizations handle a lot of animals – adopting over 24,000 cats and dogs and transferring more than 13,000 a year. The community also spays or neuters 58,000 dogs and cats per year. An important part of the story has been funding, which has come in part from the San Antonio Area Foundation, Best Friends, and PetSmart Charities. San Antonio is an amazing No Kill success story, and kudos to PetSmart Charities for providing this analysis. The Humane Society for Tacoma and Pierce Counties, in Takoma, Washington, wants to change the image of free-roaming cats. Instead of calling them “feral” they have moved to using the term “community” to describe free-roaming cats. They hope this change will help people realize that not all free-roaming cats are wild. The humane society is also trying to change the reputation of stray cats, stressing that they control rodent population. In addition to the new image for community cats, the shelter has a TNR program for them that has resulted in decreased intake. In Pima County, Arizona, the local No Kill group is partnering with the shelter to get special-needs animals adopted. No Kill Pima County, in collaboration with the shelter, has created a website to feature adoptable animals who might otherwise get overlooked because they are older or have handicaps. Hank’s Flights, a volunteer-pilot transport group based in Montgomery County, Texas, has transported 183 dogs and 20 cats since it started up in October 2014. Hank’s Flights is run by two families, and the pilots are brothers Howard and George Turek. They also volunteer with an organization that provides air transport for veterans. More good news from Baton Rouge, where the Companion Animal Alliance is continuing its efforts to make the city No Kill. Local rescue groups have stepped up their efforts to recruit fosters for animals at the city shelter, and it has paid off with 245 dogs and 86 cats going into their foster programs in the first quarter of 2015. One foster family has provided a temporary home for 15 dogs in the past year. The Stockton, California shelter continued its effort to reduce shelter killing recently with a free adoption Sunday. The Stockton shelter is running at a 79% live release rate for the first 6 months of 2015, compared to 75% for all of 2014 and 50% for all of 2013. The big improvement from 2013 to 2014 was primarily due to support from the San Francisco SPCA. Since the first 6 months of the year includes the worst part of kitten season, it is possible that the Stockton shelter will be over 80% for the year. Intake for the first 6 months of 2015 was 5,643 dogs and cats. A new director, Phillip Zimmerman, started at the shelter in January. The board of the tiny Alger County Animal Shelter, which is No Kill, unexpectedly fired director Kathy Glish recently, and some local residents are not happy. All but one board member of the shelter resigned after the backlash to the firing, so perhaps a reconciliation is still possible. Here is a nice feature about the Palm Springs Animal Shelter, and their turnaround from saving under 50% of intake four years ago to over 95% today. The key has been a public-private partnership between the city and the Friends of the Palm Springs Animal Shelter. NBC and Telemundo are hosting a Clear The Shelters day on August 15th. Quite a few large cities are participating, including over 30 local shelters in the Chicago area and over 40 shelters in the San Francisco Bay area.

The big news this week is that Richard Avanzino is stepping down as president of Maddie’s Fund in June. Avanzino is often called the father of No Kill. Individual No Kill shelters have been around since 1884, but Avanzino started the No Kill communities movement back in the 1970s and 1980s with his innovations at the San Francisco SPCA, which led to the historic Adoption Pact in 1994. He went to Maddie’s Fund in 1999. His retirement will mark the end of an era. The Beagle Freedom Project is getting publicity for its efforts to get dogs used in scientific experiments out of laboratories and into homes, including a bill in Nevada requiring laboratories to put dogs up for adoption instead of killing them. Although the number of dogs used in labs is far smaller today than it used to be, there are still a significant number. Beagles are the most common “purpose-bred” dog used in experiments. Purpose-bred dogs rescued from laboratories are similar to puppy mill dogs in their lack of experience living in a home environment. In transport news, large black dogs are going from Miami, where they are hard to adopt, to Iowa, where large dogs are in great demand. And Front Street in Sacramento is sending dogs by private plane to Idaho. HSUS has a new page on its website that collects the science proving that breed-specific legislation is misguided. The page makes note of the Centers for Disease Control’s recommendation that breed not be considered in formulating dog-bite prevention policy. The CDC has more expertise and credibility than any other organization in the United States on matters of epidemiology, so their conclusion that dog breed is not a relevant factor in dog bites deserves serious attention. The HSUS page also quotes the American Veterinary Medical Association for the proposition that dog bite statistics “do not give an accurate picture of dogs that bite,” citing factors such as the failure to correct those statistics for the relative population of each breed. In other BSL news, a bill has been introduced in the Michigan senate to ban BSL. The Tree House Humane Society in Chicago will include a cat cafe with its new facility. It will be the first cat cafe in Chicago. Madrid, the capital of Spain, has reportedly passed a bill making it illegal to kill stray animals in the city. The Chester County SPCA, which serves Chester and Delaware counties in Pennsylvania, says it has saved over 90% of its animals in each of the last four months. The shelter has just received a grant of $305,000 from PetSmart Charities to start a community-cat program that can help 4700 cats over the next 26 months. Maddie’s Fund is presenting a 5-part series of free webcasts, with Q&A sessions, on the Million Cat Challenge. It’s on five Tuesdays, starting April 7 at 9 PM EST. The presenters include Wally Stem from Waco, a city which has been making amazing strides lately. He is a city-management expert who will talk about alternatives to impoundment. Barbara Carr and Kathie Johnson will speak on the crucial topic of managed admission. Scott Trebatoski, who managed the city shelter in Jacksonville as it transitioned to No Kill and is now the shelter director in Tampa, will speak on one of the newest ideas, return-to-field. Kathleen Olsen and Ollie Davidson will speak about how to make big improvements in outcome by knowing your shelter’s capacity and how to manage it. Dr. Cynthia Delany and Kelly Lee will talk about removing barriers to adoption, including less-intrusive matchmaking. The governor of Virginia has signed the bill modifying the state’s definition of “private animal shelter.” Supporters of the new law are hopeful that the change will force PETA to shut down its slaughterhouse “shelter.” The voters in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, approved a measure last November to allow the county to borrow up to $3.79 million to build a new shelter. However, some county officials are now trying to derail the project, arguing that the proposed new shelter is too fancy. Lynchburg, Virginia’s new shelter is open. One of the features is an outdoor cat room which is “similar to a screened-in porch with pillowed benches.” Lynchburg is not far from Spotsylvania. Perhaps the Spotsylvania County officials could tour the new Lynchburg shelter and learn how proper housing is important for disease control and the mental health and ultimate successful placement of shelter animals. We keep hearing that the state of Maine is No Kill, but the trouble is in finding stats. In this interview, the incoming director of a Maine shelter says that shelters in the state do not have to kill animals based on capacity. In fact, they import animals from out of state. He attributes the state’s success to its people, who take good care of their pets, and a tax on pet food that is used to provide low-cost spay-neuter services.

Lane County is located in western Oregon and has close to 352,000 residents. It contains the cities of Eugene (156,000 residents) and Springfield (60,000 residents). Lane County Animal Services (LCAS) was a municipal shelter that served Lane County, Eugene and Springfield until 2012, when county officials put animal sheltering up for bid. Greenhill Humane Society, the only bidder, was granted the contract and took over the LCAS shelter on July 1, 2012. Currently, Greenhill runs two shelters — the former LCAS shelter on 1st Avenue in Eugene, which takes in all strays from animal control officers in Lane County, Eugene, and Springfield, and the original Greenhill shelter on Green Hill Road which takes in owner surrenders. Greenhill requires an appointment and a fee ($10 to $100) for owner surrenders, and I confirmed with the shelter that it has a waiting list for cats and generally does not accept aggressive dogs as owner surrenders. Eugene animal control officers do not impound feral cats, and Greenhill has a Trap-Neuter-Return program for feral cats in the county. The shelter states its euthanasia policy for the dual shelters as follows: “Greenhill euthanizes only in situations involving animals that cannot be safely handled – either because of aggression or contagious disease, or where the animal is suffering and a reasonable level of treatment would not be effective at improving quality of life.” LCAS was doing well before the Greenhill takeover, and reported a 94% live release rate for dogs and 88% for cats in the 2010-2011 fiscal year. When Greenhill took over, the city of Eugene began posting monthly statistics on the city website for the 1st Avenue shelter. Full statistics are posted on the Greenhill website for each fiscal year and are current through June 30, 2014. The live release rate for fiscal year 2013-2014 was 92%, with intake of 2907 animals. The live release rate for fiscal year 2012-2013 was 89% with intake of 3290 dogs and cats. Lane County is counted in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

Ocean City is a resort town located in Cape May County, near the southern tip of New Jersey. The town has 12,000 year-round residents, but in the summer the population swells to as much as 130,000 people with an influx of visitors and part-time residents. The Humane Society of Ocean City (HSOC), a private non-profit, provides animal control and sheltering for Ocean City. The shelter accepts owner surrenders by appointment, and I was told in a telephone call to the shelter that it has a waiting list. HSOC has a full-service veterinary clinic that provides low-cost care by appointment. The shelter also offers an “Affordable Spay/Neuter Clinic.” Public shelters in New Jersey report to the state’s Department of Health, which provides an annual county-by-county summary. A shelter’s individual report may be obtained by request from the state. The report for calendar year 2012 for HSOC shows that the shelter did very well, with a 97% live release rate. Intake was 179 animals, including 82 owner surrenders and 74 strays. The shelter reported that no animals died or were lost in shelter care. The shelter did not report any owner-requested euthanasias. In 2013, intake was 194 cats and dogs. The live release rate was 99%. Ocean City, NJ, was originally listed by this blog on October 3, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

By Mark Penn OK, I admit it; I’m kind of a conference junkie. A bit of an introvert, so I don’t like to make myself very conspicuous, but I enjoy, in fact I thrive, on being in a room, a stadium, or even a closet with people who have deep convictions that are similar to my own. I’ve found that in the past five years, my convictions are more and more focused on the work of the No Kill movement. And I haven’t found a better place to draw energy from fellow No Kill advocates than the various conferences that are offered by some of our leading organizations. My perspective on all of this comes from my position as a longtime board member for the Sonoma Humane Society in Northern California. We are a medium-sized private shelter, and our Board is somewhat hands-on, although only in certain areas. I was president of the board through some difficult times, including a transition of Executive Directors, a longterm financial crisis (now resolved, thankfully), and a current LRR of 97%. Now my interests as a board member focus most keenly on Advocacy. With this viewpoint, you might find my experiences to be very different from those of someone in a different capacity with a different organization. But when invited to guest-blog on my own impressions and experiences of the Best Friends National Conference, I was happy to spend the flight back across the country working on this chronicle. I’ve been to three national No Kill conferences now – the first two were produced by the No Kill Advocacy Center and were held in Washington, DC. To put it bluntly, I fell in love with the movement at these events. Unfortunately Nathan has at least temporarily suspended those yearly events, and I have been feeling the loss – until I became aware of this year’s Best Friends annual conference. It was held in Atlanta this past week (7/15-7/19) and drew just under 1500 folks from around the country. This conference was divided into several tracks, and we attendees could choose among them, and/or “cross-track” into any sessions from any area that was of interest to us. The track choices included No-Kill Components (I’m paraphrasing the titles here): Rallying the Community (Advocacy), Increasing Adoptions, Resolving Behavior Issues (animals, not people…), Animal Wellness, Fundraising, Marketing, and Leadership. Of course like most conferences, there were exhibits, mixing/networking sessions, ad hoc get-togethers, etc. Technology was running rampant at the conference, like it is most everywhere. One of the most useful tools we had at our disposal was a conference app that was very powerful, including an individual’s session planning, an easy way to keep personal notes which were also shareable if one chose to do so, session evaluation opportunities, messaging to conferees from the organizers and amongst ourselves, maps, and even a listing of nearby “veg-friendly” restaurants. Oh, and perhaps the best piece of all of that was the opportunity to download all of the powerpoints and handouts from any session, whether I attended or not, for my own reference. That part really eased my concern about not being able to get to two or more contemporaneous sessions without possessing the talent of being in two or more places at once. With this app tool, all I had to carry around with me was my smartphone. Very cool. The conference was well-organized and moved smoothly, at least from my perspective. I heard a few mutterings a couple of times from some others who wished that some of the meeting/breakout rooms were larger, but I’m not entirely sure how conference organizers plan for that, in trying to read 1500 minds and where those minds will want to go every couple of hours. The cadre of volunteers who kept us flowing and timely did a great job, and I had to give kudos, even to the woman who wouldn’t let me in to what was originally a men’s room but had been hijacked for the ladies (since we males were highly outnumbered at the conference). She was nice enough to help me find a “real” men’s room – or perhaps that should be a “real men’s” room – before things became emergent. Although the conference appeared to kick off with the Thursday afternoon sessions, there was a “pre-conference” talk available in the morning. It seemed at first odd to me that the organizers chose to begin with a session that focused on burnout (“Hearts Larger Than Hands: Creating Balance in Your Life to Save More Animals”) but as it progressed, the light went on for me – it was almost like the Catholic requirement of making confession before taking communion (if you’ll pardon the religious reference) – and I found the session to be cleansing and a great preparation for what was to follow later that afternoon and through the weekend. Clearly, if we don’t take care of ourselves in this bloody battle to stop shelter killing, we will drain ourselves of the juices necessary to save as many animals as possible. It makes sense that we are often in a cyclone of “must-do’s,” but it makes even more sense that giving ourselves a break will, in the long run, lengthen our own worklife and by extension, the number of animal lives that we can save over that longer and more efficient period of time. As a quick shout out to the excellent presentation by the session leaders, I want to mention their latest book, “The Power of Joy in Giving to Animals.” I’m looking forward to reading it. Thursday afternoon’s sessions allowed us to dive right in to the subjects at hand, and I chose to attend the sessions titled “Advocacy 101: Successful Lobbying for Community Cats,” followed by “Working the System: Understanding Good Policies and How to Get Them in Your Community.” My thirst for Advocacy was getting a good slaking right off the bat. I also have to tip my hat to the presenters. All of the sessions that I attended were well-prepared and the presenters knew their subjects while managing their audiences as well as they handled their material. I did not attend the after-hours social and networking events that were offered, as I needed an occasional recharge to absorb as much of the session information as possible, and as I said, I’m not exactly the type that bounces around the ballroom anyway. Friday began with an all-conference and enthusiastic welcome session which might have been a bit too rah-rah (from my curmudgeonly perspective), but did include interesting commentaries from several Best Friends bigwigs and ended with an engaging talk by a woman named Asha Curran, director of the Center for Innovation and Social Impact for the 92Y institution in New York. We heard about the importance of innovation and keeping up with current trends – even keeping ahead of them. The late morning session allowed us to choose one of eight highlighted No Kill communities and learn about how they achieved their success, along with some of the lessons they learned along the way. Boy, it was hard to choose – and if I had any complaint at all about the conference, it would be that I would have loved to hear several of these presentations, rather than have them presented all at the same time. After lunch there were two more sessions with several options; I selected “The Data Dance: Your No Kill Best Friend” and “Rallying the Troops: How to Engage Your Community to Save More Lives.” Saturday morning’s first event was basically a send-off and salute to Rich Avenzino, the retiring president of Maddie’s Fund, who will step down this summer. It was an informative and touching tribute to someone who clearly was behind the No Kill movement’s birth and development. The second morning session’s choice for me was “Engaged: Effective Community Messaging,” and after lunch I hit “Special Delivery: Transporting Pets to New Homes” (I’m an avid transporter; there’s nothing like having a pair of puppy eyes – or 20 pairs of them – staring at you while making a beeline down the freeway… oh yes, along with the smell of lots of poop). I confess that I missed the big “Save Them All Celebration” in the late afternoon, in favor of a little of that recharging I mentioned earlier. Sunday was a half-day affair, as the conference was officially ending before lunchtime, although it was followed in the afternoon by a separate Animal Law Symposium. As an advocate I was sorry to miss the symposium, but my airline seat was beckoning me to get home to my own fur family. I did squeeze two final sessions in on Sunday morning though: “It’s a Win-Win: Friends of Animals Programs” and “Committed Partner Outreach: The Power of Best Friends Network Partners.” As I exited that final session, of course sorry to leave the fountain of information and inspiration, the mood around the conference center was definitely more quiet and unwinding, but understandably so, and it actually gave those of us who were there until lunchtime a little bit of reflection and perhaps the beginning of a gentle letdown for our journey back to the reality of home. Now, the challenge is to take all of this terrific stuff and figure out how to use it locally. My shelter and my community would use it very differently than one somewhere else. But that, I think, is part of the beauty of all of this – the 1500 of us who descended on Atlanta leave that one single place, on 1500 different roads home, that will all hopefully bring us to one single destination: a No Kill nation. As Best Friends would say, we truly can “Save Them All.” Along with all of this “serious” stuff, I noticed that No Kill conferences must be THE most fertile ground for the collection of fascinating T-shirts. The number of organizations represented at these conferences, combined with the innovation, creativity, and convictions/missions that they bring with them, have produced some great mottos, missions, and T-shirts! Next years’ Best Friends Annual Conference will be held in Salt Lake City, July 14-17, 2016. If you are a No Kill enthusiast, or even questioning the meaning of it, and you enjoy the camaraderie of hundreds of other committed warriors, I highly recommend these endeavors. There’s nothing like a fully charged battery when it comes to this work that so often drains us of so much. Do it for yourself and for your community’s animals.

Back in the 1970s it was not common for people to have their dogs and cats sterilized, and it was common for people to allow their dogs and cats to roam as they pleased. This resulted in a lot of dogs and cats. Shelter intakes back then were about 5 times higher than they are today. Shelter statistics from those days are sketchy, but our best guess from the available evidence is that the situation for homeless pets reached a crisis point around 1970 due to their massive numbers. Killing was the default solution that shelters used for the overwhelming number of animals they received. The Lane County shelter in Eugene, Oregon, was receiving 100 animals a day, for example, even though animal control officers did not take in cats. Shelter intake in Lane County today is a tenth of that number or less. Shelter intake relative to human population back in the 1970s was about 110 per 1000 people, if not more. By comparison, average shelter intake today is estimated to be about 22 per 1000 people. But the number of animals coming into shelters was not the only problem. An even bigger problem was the number of animals that were in the streets, that shelters did not impound. For example, James Child did a study on cats in the early 1980s and found 725 to 1813 free-roaming cats per square mile in one northeastern city. If you wanted a cat or dog in the 1970s all you had to do was wait, and before long you would hear of a friend, neighbor, or relative who had a litter of puppies or kittens to give away. Or you would see someone on the street hawking free or very cheap puppies and kittens. Or you might find a litter of feral kittens in your backyard, or be adopted yourself by a homeless stray. There was no need to buy a dog or cat unless you wanted a particular type of purebred, and there was no need to go to the shelter to adopt because animals needing homes were in your neighborhood. Could shelters have saved all of their animals in the 1970s? Of the No Kill shelters I’ve studied, the ones that have intake per 1000 people of 40 or 50 or more generally seem to use transports a lot, or adopt animals to people outside of their own jurisdiction, in order to get to a 90% or better live release rate. In the 1970s all the jurisdictions were full of animals, so transports and out-of-area adoptions would just take homes from other homeless animals. Shelter workers in the 1970s were not enthusiastic about adoptions generally, because with so many animals needing homes, finding a home for a shelter puppy meant only that another puppy was left out. Adoptions in the 1970s were like a giant game of musical chairs, with not nearly enough chairs. A shelter adoption just meant that a different animal was left standing. In order to save all animals who were admitted to shelters in 1970, one out of every three people who currently owned a pet at that time would have had to adopt another one from a shelter. Then in 1971 another one out of three would have had to adopt, and so on. And with shelters putting intact animals into the environment (because back then shelters did not have the veterinary support to spay and neuter all of their animals), the pet overpopulation situation might well have gotten even worse. In a world where most dogs and cats were intact and a high percentage of them were free-roaming, shelter killing was about the only means that communities had to contain pet population. Shelter killing did not keep homeless dog and cat populations from growing, but it probably did make them grow more slowly than they otherwise would have. Could shelters have simply left animals on the street rather than taking them in only to kill them? In the 1970s, many shelters, perhaps most of them, did leave cats in the street. Cats were typically considered free-roaming and were not impounded except in cities where residents considered them to be nuisances, or public health officials considered them to be health threats. As to leaving dogs in the street, or leaving cats in the street in the cities where they were considered to be nuisances, it is doubtful that citizens in the 1970s would have tolerated that approach. A survey that was done in 1973 of city mayors found that animal nuisance complaints were the number-one complaint that mayors received on any issue. In 1970 there were very few spay-neuter programs and veterinarians did not routinely recommend that people spay and neuter their pets. At that time veterinarians were just getting adjusted to new technologies in anesthesia that made spay surgeries safer than they had been in earlier decades. Very few if any veterinarians were doing pediatric spay-neuter in the 1970s, and even people who did get their dogs and cats spayed often did not do so until after their pet had had a litter or two. That is a very depressing picture. Shelter workers who loved animals and did not want them killed faced options in the 1970s that ranged from bad to worse. So what did they do? They started a gigantic spay-neuter campaign. Today we tend to be bored with spay-neuter. We hear about it all the time, and sometimes it seems as though the “spay-neuter” mantra is just being used as an excuse not to put programs in place to get animals out of the shelter alive. But in the 1970s, the spay-neuter campaign changed the culture, and changed the world for homeless pets. We went from a country where only a minority of people sterilized their pets to a country where more than 80% did. And at the same time people began to value their pets more. That probably was not a coincidence, because the spay-neuter movement included an educational component to encourage the idea that the lives of cats and dogs had value. By the year 2000, shelter intake had plummeted by close to 70%, at the same time that the number of owned pets had more than doubled. If you look at shelter intake in 2000 relative to the number of owned pets, it had declined almost 90% since 1970. It was not the spay-neuter clinics themselves that did all those spay-neuter surgeries – what happened was that the free and low-cost clinics that were popping up all over in the 1970s inspired the veterinary profession to start to recommend spay-neuter as a routine part of health care. Even more important than the startling decline in shelter intake was the decline in homeless, free-roaming dogs in the environment. By the year 2000 feral and homeless dogs (as opposed to dogs who had homes and had strayed) were down to a miniscule number in most places, and continued to be a problem only in a few large urban areas and a few very rural areas. The number of homeless cats stayed high, possibly due to migration back and forth between the domestic and feral cat populations. But in the 1990s TNR became common and it offered a way to control community cats and reduce their nuisance behaviors. The decline in shelter intake, the decline in the number of dogs in the environment, and the growing acceptance of TNR were the factors that made No Kill theoretically possible. The growth of the internet, particularly Petfinder, and the groundbreaking work of shelters like the San Francisco SPCA made it possible to implement No Kill as a practical matter. The first No Kill communities appeared toward the end of the 1990s in San Francisco, New England, and the Denver metro area, plus many small communities in Colorado and one in Michigan. In order for shelters to increase their live releases, they had to have a “market” for their animals. The disappearance of homeless dogs from the environment allowed shelters to adopt out dogs to people who otherwise would have acquired their dog from an unwanted litter in the neighborhood or by adopting a stray. TNR provided an alternative living arrangement for cats where they would be tolerated and even supported in the environment, thus increasing their market as well. The number of adoptions from shelters and rescues went up from about 5% or so of intake in 1970 to over 40% today. This appears to have been largely due to the disappearance of “competing” animals from the environment. It is no accident that the No Kill movement started in the early 1990s, because it was at about that time that the pet overpopulation crisis had abated in the most progressive communities. In less progressive communities – those where spay-neuter rates lagged, and TNR was not in use – No Kill has taken a little longer to get a foothold. In thinking about this history, what stands out to me is the massive effort on the part of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people who devoted a great deal of their time and effort to change the tragic situation for homeless pets. In the 1970s this army of people worked on spay-neuter efforts. Beginning in the early 1990s, with the pet overpopulation problem having been greatly reduced in many places, the army began to work on increasing live releases. No Kill, more than most movements, is made up of lots of individual heroes. It is a true grass roots movement. As Rich Avanzino would say, the founders of No Kill were the American people.

The most common measure of shelter performance is the live release rate, which measures the live outcomes of an individual shelter against its euthanasias. There is another measure of shelter performance in common use, and that is Pets Per Thousand People (PPTP). Although it says “pets,” what it really measures is shelter intake per thousand people. Additional “per thousand people” measures include euthanasia (EPTP) and adoption (APTP). Proponents of the “PTP” metric (which was invented by Merritt Clifton) argue that we must standardize shelter statistics against human population to be able to compare communities to each other in a meaningful way. I think that the PPTP and its associated measurements suffer from a serious flaw in that they assume that human population is a limiting factor on a shelter’s ability to save lives. In fact, there seems to be little correlation between PPTP and shelter success. In my research on shelter stats, I have seen many successful No Kill shelters with higher than average PPTP, and some less-than-successful shelters with low PPTP. In spite of this, I think that two of the PTP measures – PPTP and APTP – can provide very useful information in some circumstances. Shelter directors may want to be familiar enough with PPTP and APTP to derive those numbers for their own shelters and to know what the numbers mean for their shelter’s performance. Explaining why is going to take a few paragraphs. Let’s start by setting out the limitations of the PTP numbers. Standardizing numbers is a good thing to do if you have a relevant variable that is not accounted for by the numbers coming out of the shelter itself. For example, if community A and community B both have 5,000 homeless animals each year, but community A has 900,000 people while community B has 100,000 people, then the task of finding homes for all the animals seems as though it would be considerably easier for community A. Thus it seems unfair to judge community A’s shelter performance as “better” than community B’s performance if the shelter in community A rehomes 4800 of its 5,000 homeless animals and the shelter in community B rehomes 4200. In the real world, though, it doesn’t seem to be true that having higher intake per person is a handicap. I have a spreadsheet where I’ve entered data on the 100 shelters that were listed on this blog at the end of 2013 as having live release rates of 90% or more (serving over 200 communities). The PPTP for the communities served by 82 of those shelters for which I had 2012 intake data ranged from 3 to 139. I don’t think there is anything significantly wrong with the data going in, because the average intake for the shelters I list was 33 per thousand people, and that is near the estimated average for the United States of 15 to 30 pets per thousand people. The communities I list on my blog are a homogeneous group in that they are all very good at successfully placing the great majority of the animals their shelters take in. I verified this not by the live release rate alone, but by my research on each community. If PPTP is a relevant variable for a shelter’s performance, then one would think that these shelters, which are all performing at a similar high level, would all have a similar PPTP, but instead the variation in PPTP is huge. Why is human population not a fully relevant variable for shelter performance? One reason is that the relationship of total human population to potential pet-owning population varies a lot from one community to another. Let’s look at an example. The community in the United States that has the lowest or near-lowest PPTP number is New York City. New York City is far from the best in terms of the live release rate, though, since the live release rate was at only 77% in 2013 and 81% in 2014. So which is it? Is the New York City community the best in the nation at saving homeless animals, or is it only somewhat above average? The problem with trying to standardize shelter killing against population for New York City is that, as a big city, it has lots of small apartments and a very high cost of living. In other words, New York City probably has a higher percentage of people who are not pet owners and are not prospective pet owners than any other city in the United States. These people are not going to affect shelter performance. They are not going to affect the intake rate because they are not going to give up a pet, fail to have a pet sterilized, or allow a pet to stray. The low PPTP is simply an artifact of the type of housing in New York. So using PPTP to compare New York City – or any other large, highly urbanized, expensive city – to a surburban or rural community is not very meaningful for shelter performance. Another reason that human population in a community is not a limiting factor on shelter performance is that today we are living in the age of transports. Transports, by taking animals from an area of low demand for shelter pets to an area of high demand, can level the playing field between communities. Going back to our example of Community A and Community B, if community B transports 4000 of its 5000 animals to Community A each year, then each shelter will have to place 10 animals per thousand people. Yet Community B will still have a much higher PPTP than Community A, because PPTP is calculated on intake without subtracting out transfers. In theory, the PPTP could be modified to account for transports, but I have not seen this suggested by any of its proponents. Proponents of the PTP metrics argue that the live release rate is unfair to the shelters that are doing the best job, because the best shelters are those that are diverting healthy and treatable animals and only taking in vicious dogs and hopelessly ill animals. This idea makes some sense in theory, but in all my researches I have yet to see an example of a public shelter that has a low live release rate because it is taking in only tough cases and diverting the easy cases. Instead, it appears that a central shelter that impounds animals before diverting them to rescues, treats most of the treatable ones in-house, and centralizes return-to-owner and lost-and-found, is the more efficient arrangement. And for that type of shelter the live release rate is an accurate measure. Even if shelters do begin to divert large numbers of animals, such as cats who go to a return-to-field program, it would be an easy matter to calculate a live release rate that reflects the diversions. Having said all that, I nevertheless think that two of the three PTP measures, PPTP and APTP, are useful in limited circumstances. The average Pets Per Thousand People (remember this is really “shelter intake” not “pets”) in the United States is estimated at 15 to 30. There are many examples of successful No Kill shelters with PPTP higher than 30. As the PPTP number gets higher though, more and more of those shelters are achieving their high live release rates by transports. Although human population is not a limiting factor for No Kill success, at some point it is a limiting factor for being able to place animals within the community. Exactly where that limiting factor is no doubt depends on the individual community, but I think a shelter with PPTP of over 40 that is struggling to maintain a high live release rate may need to think about transports. (They also need to figure out why intake is so high and see if there is anything that can be done to address it, but that is likely to be a longer-term solution.) Of the three PTP metrics, APTP is the one that has the best argument for statistical validity, because it makes intuitive sense that the number of adoptions will depend on the number of people in the community. Yet this is not entirely true, because the real limiting factor on adoptions is market share, not the number of people in a community. In all but a handful of communities in the United States, the total market for pets far exceeds the total number of pets needing homes. There are currently some 180 million pets in the United States, and only about 5 million healthy or treatable shelter animals needing homes each year. With sufficient market share, replacement alone would provide more than enough homes for shelter pets. Furthermore, about half of the animals needing homes are cats, and many of them can be returned to field, further reducing the gap between the market for pets and the supply of shelter animals. Because market share, not human population, is the real limiting factor for adoptions, shelters can control their own destiny in terms of adoptions. Some people argue that there is a ceiling to APTP and that adoption rates cannot exceed 4 to 10 APTP on a sustained basis. In fact, statistics show that No Kill shelters regularly exceed 10 APTP, which demonstrates that 10 APTP is not a ceiling but a floor. The reporting shelters for the state of Colorado, for example, averaged 17 APTP in 2014. The Nevada Humane Society has historically averaged over 20 APTP. The value of the APTP is that if a shelter is under 10, you know it has a lot of room for improvement in adoption marketing. In fact, if a shelter has an APTP below the mid-teens, it very probably can do better and it should be able to raise its live release rate without resorting to transports. I have never been able to discover a use for the EPTP, which relates the number of animals killed in a community to the number of human residents. The idea behind EPTP is that we need it to accurately evaluate public shelters that take in only vicious and terminally ill animals because they are diverting all the healthy and treatable animals. This is ill-considered since, as mentioned above, today we do not have any such public shelters. In addition, EPTP is flawed because it fails to take into account all the ways animals can be live releases without going into a home within the community. Those ways include transports, TNR, and return to field. The way I think of PPTP and APTP is not as measures of shelter performance, but as information for shelters that are struggling. Shelters that have PPTP of 30 or less and APTP of over 10 probably do not need to be concerned with the PTP metrics. But for those that do not meet those standards and are having trouble achieving a high live release rate, PPTP and APTP may provide some useful information. So how do you calculate the PPTP and APTP? The easiest way is simply to divide the intake number or adoption number by the human population of the jurisdiction served by the shelter minus three zeros. For example, if you have intake of 15,000 animals per year in a city of 1 million people, you divide 15,000 by 1,000 for a result of 15 PPTP. The APTP for a city of 40,000 people where the shelter adopted out 400 animals in a year would be 400 divided by 40, for a result of 10.

There have been two very important trends in No Kill in 2014. First is the expansion of the movement to include a lot more leaders with a variety of approaches, and second is the creativity demonstrated by brand new techniques and programs for lifesaving. These new trends mean that the movement expanded both in breadth and depth in 2014. The increase in the number of leaders has resulted in No Kill progressing beyond an earlier stage as a rather monolithic movement. As interest in the movement has grown, it has branched out in many different directions. We now have several different theories of how to approach No Kill, each one with its adherents. This has led to some splitting of the movement. I see this as healthy, because it means that ideas can be tested against each other and that No Kill can be adapted to different circumstances. One of the differences in approach is a growing distinction between top-down and bottom-up reform. Top-down reform involves trying to get a city or county to do the heavy lifting of shelter reform, and uses pressure from citizens to force or persuade the local government to replace shelter management with No Kill management and commit whatever resources are needed. Bottom-up involves citizens improving the shelter themselves, by methods ranging from volunteer involvement to formation of one or more non-profits to take over specific tasks or even bid on the shelter contract. The top down approach seems to work well in places where local government is disposed to be, or can be persuaded to be, engaged and sympathetic. Bottom up seems to work well where local government is disinterested or hostile, or where top down has been tried and failed for some reason. Bottom up can gradually bring about a change for the better in the attitude of the local government as citizens prove that No Kill ideas can work and be cost-effective. 2014 has been the year of the No Kill consultant. More and more, cities and counties are turning to consultants to help them with the many choices to make in finding No Kill techniques to fit their particular circumstances. This is a trend with a lot of potential, and it illustrates the fact that No Kill can be somewhat daunting for local governments. The steps a city or county needs to take depend on where the community is starting from and the local circumstances. Good consultants can help local governments sort all that out. Consultants are a new leadership class in No Kill. As time goes on their experience in many different communities can be invaluable for helping No Kill chart its future course. There is no substitute for recent, boots-on-the-ground experience in a wide variety of circumstances. No Kill consultants can serve as a bridge or compromise between the top down and bottom up approaches. Consultants often seem to be brought in where local governments want to make some changes but they do not want to be on the hook for doing something radical, or they are simply uncertain who to listen to. Consultants might, depending on the circumstances, suggest leadership, operational, or program changes. Consultants can also uncover problems that no one realized were there, as with the recent Manatee County, Florida, report which found that very few shelter employees supported No Kill. Perhaps that was due to very poor previous implementation of No Kill, but whatever the cause it is a problem that must be addressed. The demand for consultants is part of a growing recognition and acceptance of the fact that No Kill is not just a simple matter of plugging in modular programs. In the past, sometimes No Kill advocates seem to have felt like they had to present No Kill as a cheap, one-size-fits-all set of programs that gave immediate results when properly implemented. This simplistic approach was perhaps motivated by a fear that acknowledging that No Kill could be complicated might lead to resistance on the part of government officials. Today, as cultural ideas about the value of pets have continued to change and improve, citizens do not have to be so defensive in asking for shelters to do better. Large national organizations like HSUS and the ASPCA have been assuming more and more of a leadership role in No Kill. Both HSUS and the ASPCA have signed on to some radical new ideas for how shelters should handle cats, and this has helped greatly with the acceptance and rapid spread of those new ideas. Large mainstream national organizations can serve a similar function to consultants in making it palatable for local officials to implement No Kill ideas. By giving No Kill ideas their imprimatur, the large national organizations can take the weight of decision-making off the shoulders of local officials who may know little about sheltering. In the past there has been some degree of mistrust and separation between No Kill and the large national organizations, HSUS and the ASPCA. Some elements of No Kill have viewed HSUS and the ASPCA as enemies of No Kill, and in the past there have been some pretty hard words said on both sides. To the extent that this was ever appropriate, it no longer is. Unfortunately, there is one exception to this new era of cooperation and respect between the large national organizations and No Kill, and that is PETA. PETA appears to still be stuck in a mode of implacable opposition to No Kill. Another trend in No Kill in 2014 is that it is now big business. When I first started documenting No Kill communities about four years ago, the great majority of the communities I researched were small, and many of them were tiny. Today I don’t even bother trying to keep track of all the new small communities that are popping up with No Kill efforts, because I’m too busy trying to keep up with the bigger cities. Along with the increasing diversity of No Kill leadership, we have had broad acceptance of some groundbreaking new ideas in 2014. These are brand new No Kill programs for how to reduce intake and increase live releases. One really important thing about these new programs is that they are user-friendly because they make a shelter’s job easier, not harder. For example, a program of leaving community cats in place or offering shelter-neuter-return can be easier than picking up stray cats, holding them for several days, and then killing them. And a managed admissions program makes a shelter’s workload easier to handle than random drop-offs. Marketing has been a linchpin of No Kill for some time, but it continues to grow and change. 2014 was the year the mega-adoption event went mainstream, with many communities having one or more giant adoption events in venues that get a lot of foot traffic. Mega-adoption events are becoming community festivals that go far beyond the traditional shelter adoption special. They fit in very well with the idea that the local shelter should be an integral part of the community. Shelter marketing is spreading into more and more venues. A couple of the more striking new marketing ideas in 2014 were cut-outs of available pets lounging on sofas and chairs at furniture stores, and shelter pets being integrated into a traditional production of the Nutcracker. One way to look at this explosion of new leaders and new ideas in 2014 is that it represents No Kill getting back to its roots. When No Kill was developing in the 1980s and 1990s, it was very creative and new leaders and new ideas were welcomed. Then No Kill went through a period of regimentation where many advocates believed that there was only one right way to get to No Kill, and any deviation from that one right way had to be summarily rejected and fiercely criticized. In 2014 it has become unmistakable that we are now in an era where once again new leaders and ideas are welcomed. That may be the most important takeaway from 2014.